Best Viking Novels:The 45 Best Historical NovelsSet in the Viking Age

~ Viking Raiders and Traders ~

by David Maclaine

The Viking Age began when Norse raiders sailed
across the North Sea and sacked the great Abbey at Lindesfarne near the close
of the eighth century. When it ended is not so clear cut; I'll draw the line in
1066, when King Harald of Norway
invaded England,
leading indirectly to its conquest by Duke William of Normandy, leader of a
realm founded by Scandinavian raiders in the early tenth century.

The raiders and traders who set out
from Norway, Denmark and Sweden were a chief force in
shaping the Western World during those two and half centuries. Their assaults
on what we now call France,
the Netherlands and Germany played
a crucial role in the fragmentation of Charlemagne’s empire, leading to the
emergence of those realms as distinct nations. In Ireland, the raiders built bases that
gave the locals their first real experience of urban life, as well as contact
with an international trading network.

Their descent in force on Britain
destroyed all but one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The survivor, Wessex, became
a nation in the course of resisting the Viking assaults and recapturing the
lands they had taken. Scotland, too, was shaped by their incursions, Iceland
colonized by their outcasts, and the embryonic beginnings of the Russian state formed
by their chain of trading posts in the east. Scandinavian mercenaries served in
the armies of Byzantine emperors, and Viking ships dominated waterways from the
Black Sea to the North Atlantic. Along the way,
the Scandinavian nations took shape, sometimes with wider consequences, as when
the emergence of a powerful, unified Danish kingdom led to its conquest of England
in the early eleventh century.

These centuries of high drama, during
which the life of a dozen nations was forever altered by the onslaught of
plunder-seeking pirates from the sea, have not yet been rendered into fiction
with the thoroughness a fan might wish. So far, novels offer only a few
glimpses of the long, fascinating tale of the Norsemen in Ireland, where two
cultures clashed and intermingled amid the ever-shifting alliances
characteristic of that land of a hundred kings. Likewise, far too little
fiction has been spun from the epic tale of how the Danish assaults shaped the
history of the Continent. But the rest of the wide-ranging events of those
centuries have been treated with some skill and thoroughness, giving readers a
decent view of the vast watery realm across which sailed the dragon-headed
longships.

The novels in Origins and Overview give a taste
of the Vikings' beliefs about their own past and offer thrilling stories of how
Norway
became a kingdom and successive kings clashed to win its throne. Those in The
First Eruption will take you from the earliest raids on England and Scotland
to the first great assault on France,
including incursions into Charlemagne’s empire and that of the Byzantines.

In
the novels of The Crucible, which deal with the middle to late ninth century,
you can glimpse some of the complexities of Viking-Age Ireland and get a more complete
overview of the great struggle between Danes and Saxons that forged the English
nation. In The Adventurous Tenth Century you can sail from one end of the
Viking world to the other, following the wakes of raiders and royalty. The
Eleventh-Century Clash of Nations shows how a final wave of Scandinavian
attacks challenged Scotland,
Ireland and especially
England. Far more often than in my lists of novels set in ancient Greece and Rome,
these tales center on violent clashes of arms, an inevitable feature of this
age when Western civilization barely avoided a complete descent into barbarism.

David Maclaine’s interest in history was kindled in childhood, when a cousin showed him the strange toy soldiers he used to play "Greeks and Romans." By high school, he had discovered historical novels about Hannibal and Themistocles. All this led him to St. John’s College in Santa Fe, the "Great Books" school whose program starts off with immersion in the ancient Greek world: Plato and Aristotle, Herodotus and Thucydides, Euclid’s geometry and two years of ancient Greek. Later, he wrote features and reviews for Willamette Week and the column "Rembrandts and Reruns" in the monthly Black Lamb. He also picked up a Masters in English at Portland State University, exploiting his classical background to show how Hobbes stole from Thucydides, how Donne knew his Ptolemy, and how medieval Romances about Alexander the Great inspired a famous Monty Python scene. He is currently at work on a non-fiction book about some remarkable, little-known medieval women who turn out to be his ancestors. His blog is davidmaclaine.wordpress.com